Maintained by Robin Tecon, microbiologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich. This blog is about bacteria (and other microbes) and the scientists who study them.

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Monday, January 26, 2015

The Logic of Life (La logique du vivant) opens with the following quote by the French philosopher and Enlightenment figure Denis Diderot:

"Do you see this egg? It's with it that we overturn all theological schools and all temples on Earth".

[All translations in this post are mine.]

The choice of a 18th century thinker for the epigraph prefigures a lot of this book, which was published by the late Nobel laureate François Jacob in 1970. The book—subtitled "a history of heredity"—thus proves to be of great erudition and cites the original work of, among many names, Paré, Montaigne, Paracelse, Descartes, Galilée, Harvey, Réaumur, Buffon, Redi, Leibniz, D'Holbach, La Mettrie, Lamarck, Linné, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire... and I haven't even mentioned the 20th century references yet! Excusez du peu!

This story of heredity truly is a huge endeavor, spanning about four centuries of philosophical and scientific attempts to understand what kind of stuff we're made of. Articulated in long chapters that correspond to conceptual milestones ("visible structure", "organization", "time", "gene", "molecule", and "integron"), the book follows the chronological development of our biological knowledge (which was part of "natural philosophy") with plenty of referenced sources and with a quality of writing that is hardly matched today.